Here's a little glimpse of what Nicolas Pelham found in Tripoli some 4 weeks ago:

"The sense of local ownership of the revolution is important: No one
has stripped the electricity cables from pylons for their copper, as
Iraqis did after the US invaded their country and toppled Saddam
Hussein. Libyans, who before the uprising depended on an army of foreign
labor, farm their own allotments, run their own shops, sweep the
streets and volunteer as hospital nurses. Homeowners with private wells
open their doors to those with none. On their own initiative, policemen
in Fashloum, a working-class district in the center of town, met in the
mosque on the first Friday after the colonel's flight and agreed to
reestablish a local force. By midday the following day, a score of its
hundred policemen had reported for duty.
Residents of housing estates who rarely spoke to each other under
Qaddafi have created neighborhood councils, merging elders from the
traditional conflict resolution mechanisms, the lijan al-sulh
(reconciliation committees), with the underground leadership that
planned the revolt, as well as respected men from the mosque. Within a
week, their subcommittees were supplying better services than the city's
five-star hotels. The mosque in Hadaba's Haddad quarter, a poor
district of rural migrants, offered air conditioning and so much water
it spilled into the streets. Ironically, in the colonel's absence,
Tripolitanians created the very social system he had taught but never
realized -- a jamahiriyya, a decentralized network of grassroots, non-partisan people's committees."

http://www.merip.org/mero/mero090711